Quote 2599
More often than not, when shamans, witchdoctors, prophetesses, mediums, and sorcerers did their work in the ancient world, a brew of some sort of hallucinogenic form was employed. And the two practices became so associated in the minds of the ancient Greek world that they shared a single word: pharmakeia.
Lewis Ungit
Return of the Dragon, 86-871K
Other Quotes from the Author & Topic
People claim to be enlightened by the experiences, but when you ask them what they learned, you get saccharine cliches about the oneness of everything and how we just need to love everyone. Not exactly enlightening. This inability of users to share experiences or articulate lessons is notorious.Return of the Dragon, 128
Recently I read of an African bishop who was visiting Vancouver. Friends there had brought him to the popular tourist attraction, the Totem poles of Stanley Park. His friends were mortified when the Bishop started praying to exorcise demons from the poles and all who would worship them. When his friends asked him why he did it, he explained that he comes from a region where the danger of such religious practices is well known and the demons in the totems do real damage in the real world.Return of the Dragon, 108-109
What if at least some of the old myths record real stories of real entities observed during some moment of altered consciousness in which the observers are able to see into the other dimensions? What if the warnings against the use of pharmakeia by the Bible and the historic Church are not the result of simple close-minded, fun spoiling bishops, but the result of the observation of something very real and very dangerous being very near to us all the time?Return of the Dragon, 132
So we think we are being enlightened but we come out with Hallmark greetings? No. People who regularly do psychedelics do not have stronger marriages or better relationships with their parents and children. They are not known for doing more charity work than sober people. It is hard to point to a single place where the users of psychedelics are more moral or ethical than the general population.Return of the Dragon, 128
researchers at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine showed that a majority of atheists who took DMT became convinced that there is more to this life than the material world.The Return of the Dragon, 31
The Christians of the Middle Ages remembered three things that we have forgotten: Drugs used for spiritual purposes. Serpent Gods. And human sacrifice.Return of the Dragon, 110
The word for witchcraft and the word for drugs are the same in the language of the Bible. The Friberg Lexicon defines pharmakeia as, "one who prepares and uses drugs for magical purposes or ritual witchcraft, sorcerer, poisoner, magician."Return of the Dragon, 84
As Christianity developed from a small sect of Judaism in a corner of the Roman Empire to the largest and most powerful religion in the world, arguably one of the biggest effects was the banishment of the use of drugs for religious purposes.Return of the Dragon, 83
Why has western civilization been so opposed to the religious and spiritual use of drugs? The short answer is Christianity.Return of the Dragon, 83
consciousness is ultimately unobservable to science. If this outspoken atheistic neuroscientist admits the opacity of consciousness to science, how in the world can we then claim that neuroscience can explain a particular experience of consciousness?
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